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2005b: Linux Bible: Review of Christopher Negus' talk

Linux Bible

Christopher Negus

By Dennis Kenney

The speaker at the February Boston Linux and Unix SIG, Christopher Negus,
worked the Wiley booth at LinuxWorld Boston 2005, promoting his latest books.
The titles evolved over time and I may not have them right.

Linux Bible

The Linux Bible, 2005 Edition was intended to cover the new Fedora product from
Red Hat but ended up being a compilation of all of the popular versions of Linux
including the tiny versions, which according to Wiley.com "includes Fedora Core 3,
Debian Linux, SuSE Linux, Knoppix, Gentoo Linux, Slackware Linux, Mandrake
Linux, Damn Small Linux, and a Linux firewall and router on DVD." The enclosed
DVD includes enough of the various distributions to do comparative evaluations of
the various flavors of Linux.

Fedora

Red Hat Fedora and Enterprise Linux 4 describes Fedora which was designed as a
safety net for the users of the Red Hat desktop version. The book "comes complete
with the full DVD of Fedora Core 4, including all binary code packages and source
code." Fedora is updated much more frequently than the enterprise version, and was
developed for corporate and small-business America in response to the unease that
business had with the desktop version of Red Hat, which isn't supposed to be ready
for prime time. Immature modules were to be introduced and beta-tested in the
desktop version.

Toys

Linux Toys: 13 Cool Projects for Home, Office and Entertainment sounds more
intriguing than Chris' usual successful books. Now Chris is working on Linux Toys
II, the sequel to Linux Toys. II will have multimedia projects, a home gaming server,
and at least one wireless project. The books try to demonstrate some new tricks for
Linux and old PCs.

FUD and Confusion - FUDCon 2005

Chris stalked FUDCon (Friday), which Michael Tiemann of Red Hat said had been
rapidly organized over the last few months to clarify Red Hat's plans for the desktop
and server versions of Red Hat Linux. Fear, uncertainty and doubt have certainly
been part of the Linux World the last few years as exemplified by the SCO litigation.
Red Hat organized FUDCon to explain Red Hat's cessation of support for the
desktop version of Red Hat, while it concentrated its support for the $1000 a server
enterprise edition. Eric Raymond was brought in by Michael to rant about the unease
in the Red Hat community.

Michael Tiemann

Michael shows the value that the steam engines developed by Savery, Watts et al had
during its patent-protected period (used to pump water out of mines) compared to its
expansion to locomotives and other applications when development and profits were
released to the public domain. Michael, occasionally involved in controversy, discussed
the ongoing problem of intellectual property and value-added in the free and open-source
world. The founder of Cygnus Solutions is a pioneer in the open-source software movement
- Cygnus Solutions was incorporated in 1989 and was acquired by Red Hat in 1999.

Eric Raymond

Eric reported that he is on a quest to subvert man. He wants the man pages in various
Unices including the Red Hat and SuSE distributions to be available to browsers. He
had developed a utility, clipper, which automatically converts 99% of existing man
pages to HTML as his contribution to the problem. Browsers are, of course, the
principle means of viewing data on the Web. When asked if he could be quoted as
saying he wanted to convert mankind, Eric answered with a grin that that is his
ultimate goal.

Chris was forced to speed up the ending of his talk by scenes of the Cambridge Brewery
and a glass of amber beer flashing on the screen behind him. Like Pavlov's dogs, the
BLU.orggers get thirsty at this time of the night. Chris had to return to the Hynes and
didn't join the group including two European Sun employees that assembled at the
Brewery.